‘The Retreat’ Review: A chilling but flawed lesbian slasher
A frightening premise and two solid lead performances add up to a tense and gruesome lesbian-themed thriller
If you should venture to some remote, forbidding forest, and find yourself alone with your partner in an unfamiliar cabin, fearful you’re being watched by someone outside, try to keep track of your phone.
The characters in the chilling but flawed slasher pic The Retreat (★★★☆☆) learn this the hard way, committing more than their share of rookie horror-movie mistakes. Casually wandering into darkness to investigate a stalker in the woods, without turning on the flashlight in your hands — that surely will not end well. (Where’s Scream oracle Randy when you need him?)
But, as imperfectly plotted and indecipherably shot as the film sometimes is, it’s also downright disturbing at times, carried by a simple, engaging premise, and Tommie-Amber Pirie and Sarah Allen as Renee and Val, a Toronto lesbian couple who wind up fighting for their lives.
The pair starts out happily (albeit somewhat reluctantly for Renee) road-tripping deep into the Canadian woods to meet Val’s college bestie Connor (Chad Connell) and his fiancé Scott (Munro Chambers) at a gay-owned B&B for a wedding planning retreat.
That sounds horrifying in and of itself, but luckily for skeptical Renee, wedding planning quickly falls off the agenda: Connor and Scott are nowhere to be found when the ladies arrive. Not so luckily, as depicted in the opening scene, Connor and Scott never actually made it inside the cabin.
Director Pat Mills sets the mood properly with Steph Copeland’s Carpenter-esque score, and a palette that’s filled in daylight with the rippling reds and ochers of the autumn woods, and at night is doused in shadow. Nearly anywhere in the expanse, someone sinister might be lurking. Cinematographer David Schuurman, and perhaps budget limitations, push that notion a bit far in some of the night photography, dark and inscrutable enough to warrant squinting at the screen. Is that an axe? Where is she running? Where are they right now?
And yet, the hook, no pun intended, pulls you right in, as the movie confirms early on that Renee and Val aren’t paranoid. Someone is watching them — but who, and for what purpose? Screenwriter Alyson Richards has said that the premise was inspired by a trip she and her wife took to a remote wilderness retreat in the middle of nowhere. “We never saw our hosts, but kept feeling like we were being watched.”
Tapping into Renee and Val’s creeping sense of feeling exposed and vulnerable, particularly as queer women in a potentially hostile environment, The Retreat cranks up the suspense, even as it finally reveals its cards amid bursts of extreme slasher gore and violence.
Pirie and Allen harmonize well as a couple still considering where they want to take their relationship, while also confronting a terrifying danger together. They deliver the only performances of note in the film, with the exception of Celina Sinden, as a mysterious woman Val and Renee encounter in the woods.
First glimpsed lit warmly in a window, a beacon of hope, the woman might be an ally or she might be a victim herself. Renee and Val might even be able to borrow her phone — but they can only rely on each other if they hope to survive the retreat.
The Retreat will be released on Friday, May 21 in select theaters and on VOD platforms everywhere.
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